achieve seamless integration with legacy
IT systems, reduce costs and risks associated with deployment, and enjoy the full
range of benefits from its Oracle applications more quickly than it could have by
marshalling internal resources or working
with a third-party consultant.

“It’s worth paying a little premium for
expert services if it’s going to help you
get to the end game faster and realize the
return on your investment quicker,” says
Reed. “We were able to get resources in
here that could hit the ground running.”

With Oracle’s Advanced Customer
Services team behind him, Reed has been
able to take advantage of years of experience working with Oracle technology,
experience that ranges from knowledge of
the applications themselves to familiarity
with the best practices that have helped
other Oracle customers achieve powerful
results. Combine that with the Advanced
Customer Services team’s growing knowledge of MassMutual’s technology, and
Reed knows that his efforts are backed by
experts who know not only how to get
the most from his applications but also
how those applications could best integrate into MassMutual’s existing IT assets.

Also, MassMutual has been working
with the same principal technical account
manager, Stephen Blanchard, for more
than three years. This continuity has been
invaluable, says Reed. “Oracle’s expert
understanding of our technology footprint has helped us and will continue to
help us plan future upgrades.”

Having such a close working relationship with Oracle’s Advanced Customer
Services team has made the difference
between MassMutual simply having great
technology in place and realizing the full
value of that technology. “It’s been a great
partnership, and we really have moved
their usage along, as well as their understanding of the product,” says Blanchard.

Frank Zucco, MassMutual’s CRM
project manager, recalls a time when
the company faced challenges getting its
integrations connected and running, and
Blanchard put him in direct contact with
the Oracle developers who created the
technology. “We had engineers on the
phone, so here are the guys who basically wrote the code, helping us resolve

some of the issues we were having,” saysZucco. “I thought that was pretty power-ful.” The way the issues were resolvedwas an ideal example of how a partner-ship with Oracle Advanced CustomerServices yields more than just accessto expertise; when MassMutual has aproblem, Oracle will marshal whateverresources are necessary to solve it asquickly as possible.

POWERING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Once the integrations were in place,
Reed and his team were able to demonstrate to executives the power of the
resulting solution. For example, when
MassMutual Retirement Services recently
named Elaine Sarsynski as the organization’s executive vice president, one of
the first things Sarsynski asked for was
a demo of the Siebel dashboard. She
hoped it would provide the information
she needed to monitor the business and
make swift decisions—and it did. During
the demo, Sarsynski was immediately
able to access sales portfolios for the reps
that she was planning to meet with the
following day. The fact that she could
instantly tap the capabilities of the tools
at her disposal was a powerful validation
of the work done by Reed’s staff.

This is just one example of the capabilities that have led Reed to conclude
that the value of Oracle software is
inherently connected to the support that
Oracle Advanced Customer Services and
the technical account manager provide.
He believes that when you’re making a
substantial investment in software, you
want to move quickly, and you want
access to the right answers. For that
reason, he credits the contribution of

Oracle’s Advanced Customer Services
team for helping MassMutual realize
benefits it otherwise might not have
seen for years. The kinds of integrations
the company sought—in which Siebel
CRM and Oracle Business Intelligence
are linked to a variety of legacy systems,
enabling MassMutual to convert previously disparate pools of data into a foundation for decisive action—could have
been achieved in a timely fashion only
with the help of the Advanced Customer
Services team’s experience. That has
translated into MassMutual being able to
target its customer outreach in ways the
company’s competition can’t match.

The robust capabilities MassMutual
has been enjoying are expected to
become even more compelling once the
company completes its upgrade to the
latest versions of Siebel CRM and Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise
Edition. Those upgrades, expected to
be finished by midyear, will broaden
the analytical powers of MassMutual’s
CRM environment, raising the bar on the
kinds of data decision-makers will have
at their fingertips.

“What we’re able to offer is a true analytical capability, so that you can understand what the data’s telling you and turn
it into action plans,” says Reed. “That’s
something that enables our service professionals to transform the level of service
that we’re providing. We’ve made a real
change in our business—we’ve gone from
providing something that’s transactional
to providing something that is far more
consultative and deeper in value.” <>

TONY KONTZER is a business/technology writer based
in Silicon Valley who has written for Investor’s Business Daily, CIO Insight, Network World, and Wired.